Coding Standard

Coding standards help us to ensure that our code is safe, secure, and reliable. This improves the maintainability of applications. This is significantly important if we are working in a team. Good coding practices prevent errors, control complexity, and accelerate delivery.

Different people have different perspectives on what all conditions must your code satisfy before you can call it good code. So in this short blog, I am going to write about the things which I consider to be very important when it comes to code quality. Hope you like it!

Meaningful Names

Following a typography for naming your variables, functions, and classes is always a good practice. Select your case type and always write names in that case so that they become more clear and readable

1. Function: Function name should be a verb ie: it should represent an action. For example addNewRequest , updateRequest etc. Use camelCase notation for naming a function.
2. Variables: Variable name should be a noun or in technical language, it should be an object. For example number1, activeRequest. This should also follow the camelCase notation.
3. Constants: Constants follow UPPER_CASE notation with _ used for separation. For example AVERAGE, MATCH_ID.
4. Classes: Class names use Capitalization notation. Writing the first letter of a word in uppercase, and the rest of the letters in lowercase. For example Main, Solution.

Proper Indentation

Some beginners start writing without keeping in mind proper spacing and indentations. Generally, their code looks something like this —

This is just 15 lines of code and how messy it looks. Imagine the same when with thousand lines of code. Now have a look at how beautiful a code with proper indentation looks. It becomes like a nicely written poem, which the programmer can read and understand easily.

Tree-like directory structure

Don't write the whole code in a single file. It is a good practice to maintain a proper tree-like directory structure.

Maintaining a good directory structure makes coding much more efficient. When you are doing a big project, maintaining such a good structure will save you time in searching for the files you need.

Comments

It is a very good practice to write comments for each and every function or module you write. Doing this helps a lot in debugging the code in case of errors. If you have comments for every particularity of code, it helps understand where the code went wrong, in case there are bugs. Have a habit of writing comments because they help anyone (including your future self) to maintain, refactor, or extend your code.

Keep your code DRY

DRY is an abbreviation for don’t repeat yourself. Repeating the same lines of code many times is considered a very bad practice in coding. Code can be kept DRY, with the extensive use of functions. whenever you see that you are repeating the same lines of code, make it a function. Keeping your code DRY has many advantages like it keeps your code clean and reduces the chances of bugs.

Conclusion

“Just because you can write a program doesn’t make you a good programmer, writing a code which even a layman can understand is what makes you a good programmer”